right to the senate floor where senator mitch mcconnell is actually speaking about the fiscal cliff. let's take a listen. >> we'll see what the president has to propose. members on both sides of the aisle will review it, and then we'll decide how best to proceed. hopefully, there's still time for an agreement of some kind that saves the taxpayers from a wholly, wholly preventable economic crisis. mr. president, i yield the floor. >> the majority leader. >> i'm not sure my distinguished republican counterpart has followed what has taken place in the house of representatives. the house, as reported lie the press and we all know, one of the plans that didn't have a name, it wasn't plan "b," i don't know what plan it was because they've had a number over there, but this plan was to show the american people that the $250,000 ceiling on raising taxes wouldn't pass in the house. why didn't they have that vote? because it would have passed. they wanted to kill it. the speaker wanted to show everybody that it wouldn't pass the house. but he couldn't bring it up for vote because it would have pass

, what can you deliver? at this point it really comes down to mcconnell and boehner and what they think they can deliver, and based on what boehner can deliver, i think the other key player in this is going to be leader nancy pelosi because she may have to deliver some democratic votes to get something done. >> reporter: absolutely. pelosi and mcconnell are really going to sort of step into the center stage at this point in time. they are going to be crucial as well as, of course, house speaker john boehner, but really there's going to be a lot of focus right now on the senate because, as you remember, house speaker john boehner tried to get his own bill passed through the house. that didn't happen. he didn't have enough votes, so essentially everything shifts right now to the senate. so harry reid, mitch mcconnell, nancy please elosi on the house to say here are the number of democrats i could get if you offer a compromise package. but this is really a tough situation because there's so little time left and we've already seen the markets impacted by this. so if we do go over the cliff,

be a protest vote and make him go to a second ballot. also mitch mcconnell doesn't want his fingerprints on this because he doesn't want to be primaried. so you have these sort of -- shall we say, the lack of courage or ziesh to move on this from mcconnell and boehner, it's directly tied to prospects to serve in current jobs. it's a fascinating subplot. >> i want to pick up on that on something jared was starting to say. some degree we're playing a bit of a game of semantics here. because there's some calculation that the republicans say we go over the cliff and then technically we can be seen as not voting to increase taxes, but we can be seen as voting for cutting taxes once the sort of -- we go over the cliff and we're on the other side of it. am i right about that? >> yeah. it's a very cynical ploy. the idea of the tax automatically reset for everybody. they can say i didn't vote for that. they all go up. and then they can vote to lower taxes for the $250,000 and below households. that's 98% of households. that's a -- that's something like a -- you know, a multi -- that's something l

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